From Novel to MMO

Managing Editor Jon Wood recently had the chance to sit down with Jeff Anderson, the President and CEO of Turbine Inc. In this, the first part of a two part interview, Jon and Jeff discuss the process of taking an epic work like JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and turning it into a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

For anyone who might not be aware, Turbine currently holds the rights to two major Intellectual Property (IP) games, Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach which launched almost a year ago, and now the upcoming Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (LOTRO). Creating a game based on a well known IP isn't the easy, slam-dunk that you might expect. A great deal of time and care has to be put into the creation of the game, and, as Jeff told me, it creates multiple commitments and priorities for the developers. First, there is the priority of making a good, solid MMORPG. Next, you have to be careful to stay true to whatever the IP happens to be. In the case of my conversation with Jeff, the task that falls to him is more daunting than most. To re-create the world of Middle-Earth, a place that J.R.R. Tolkien brought to the individual imaginations of over 200 million readers making it, according to Jeff, "without a doubt, one of the most widely read books on the entire planet".

The purpose of Friday's interview was to get to the root of what exactly it takes to move something from the page onto the grand stage of an MMORPG.